The Blue Blazes

by Chuck Wendig

  “Gobbos.”

  Elevator, top floor. Ding.

  The smell of blood and human waste hits him even before the doors open.

  The body. Not ten feet away.

  The hallway is all creams. Walls like cream-in-coffee. Floors like cream before the coffee. A few punctuations of darkness here and there – a black lampshade, a couple dark lines in the wainscoting, the wrought-iron of the elevator.

  And blood.

  Dark blood. A lot of it.

  Casimir Zoladski is face down on the marble. Sticky dark stuff spreading beneath a face smashed too far into the floor, so far that his face must be crushed and crumpled like an empty egg carton.

  The grandson’s black jacket lies another ten feet to the left. His white shirt has been cut open. Not ripped, but cut. Delicately. Surgically, Mookie thinks. Like a pig’s belly opened by a careful hand with a sharp knife. Or a claw.

  Symbols lie carved in the pale stretch of his dead back. Symbols Mookie doesn’t recognize – the rifts in the flesh form an inverted triangle (one point ending at each shoulder blade), and inside that triangle are lines that suggest a maze. And at the center of that maze is something that Mookie can only describe as a mouth. A circle with crude pointed teeth and forked tongue cut in the flesh.

  Werth tilts his head toward the body. “Check the hands.”

  Mookie stoops down. Knees popping. He grabs the wrist. Already stiffening. Turns it, sees a flash of orange: withered marigold. In this hand, and in the other.

  “Two broken links of iron chain in the pockets,” Werth says.

  Mookie grunts.

  Sees something else, too. The fingertips. Smudgy with – at first he thinks, blood, his own blood, but no, it’s something else. Mookie bends down almost like he’s praying. He has to get close to smell it.

  He knows the smell. Because he knows food.

  “Chocolate,” he says. “Dark chocolate.”

  Then, something else. A whiff of the familiar.

  He crawls around to the front of the body.

  Lifts the head. Hates to do it but has to. There’s the sound of peeling skin, like he’s scraping a car-smashed raccoon off the road–

  In the middle of the stink of blood and human waste, he can smell something else.

  A smoky, briny stink. Like the wind off the ocean. Like a peaty swamp.

  And an acrid tang with it, too. Fruity and sour.

  Booze. Like a peaty Islay Scotch. No. Wait. Like the roasted whiff of mezcal, tequila’s stranger, smokier cousin. That’s what it is. He’s about to say as much when two figures enter from a side door.

  Haversham and the Boss. Oxygen tank squeaking behind.

  The Boss looks a thousand miles away. Like he’s barely there inside his own skin, like what’s here and walking around is just a saggy scarecrow, his mind’s somewhere else, somewhere distant. He barely even notices Mookie and Werth.

  Haversham in alarm: “What are you doing?”

  Mookie swiftly stands, moving his prodigious bulk fast as he can, stammering out, “I was just – I thought I smelled something–”

  The Boss, staring off at nothing, whispers, “Fucking tragedy.” The old man’s body trembles, as if cold.

  “Fucking tragedy,” Werth echoes.

  The kill, Mookie thinks, is ritual. Some of it he understands – if only loosely. Ofrendas. Offerings. Marigolds, chocolate, liquor. Day of the Dead-style gifts to those who have passed on: not something you usually find on a fresh corpse. The links of broken chain, though, and that symbol – those are different.

  “You want us to get who did this?” Mookie asks.

  “We know who did it,” the Boss says. Voice a rattling wind stirring dry leaves. He takes a hit off the oxygen and closes his eyes.

  “Who?” Werth finally says after a few seconds of silence. “Point us at ’em.”

  “Walk with me,” the Boss says.

  He and Haversham walk forward. The old man creeps slow, rasping and wheezing, sometimes coughing and taking a hit from the oxygen. Mookie and Werth share a bewildered, uncomfortable look and follow after like dutiful children. As Mookie walks, his nose catches that same scent from downstairs, a scent suddenly and dreadfully familiar: a perfume of flowers.

  Nora sits on a park bench just inside Central Park off Fifth Avenue. Her hands shake. People hurry past, laughing, talking, texting.

  Every moment feels hyper-real. Part of it’s the Blue. But only a small part.

  She turns her palms up on her knees. Sees the blood on her hands.

  Oh god, oh god, oh god.

  A taxi honks.

  A siren somewhere in the distance.

  Her mouth is dry. The taste of Snakeface magic lingers under her tongue.

  She’s afraid to blink because of what she’ll see behind her lidded eyes. So she keeps them open. Tries to regulate her breath. Tries to still her trembling limbs.

  Keep it together. This can work.

  No time to feel anything, you dumb girl.

  Stop! Stop thinking about it!

  Everything is an opportunity.

  You’re going to text Skelly.

  You’re going to tell her it’s beginning.

  Then you’re going to stand up, and you’re going to move.

  But first, you’re going to stop crying.

  She blinks back tears. Wipes her eyes.

  Then she texts Skelly.

  Back downstairs. A small room past the door to the wine cellar, near the kitchen. Inside: a bank of eight monitors next to a shelf full of fireproof file boxes. Surveillance for cameras watching the Boss’ house. The room isn’t big, and it feels like everybody’s having to crowd around and cram in next to Mookie. Which only serves to make Mookie feel awkward, a man in a dress shop, a vegetarian at a slaughterhouse. And all that time, the smell of his daughter’s perfume lingering in his nose.

  He suddenly worries about what he’s going to see in this room, on these monitors.

  Haversham reaches past Mookie, flips one switch of eight on the wall–

  The top left monitor comes to life.

  The black-and-white feed shows the front door of the building. Catches people walking up and down the street, but only in periphery: one arm, feet, part of a face, a head. Incomplete shapes, nothing more.

  Haversham reaches for a second panel – this one with a set of dials. He turns one of them left – and instantly the live feed starts to rewind behind a curtain of static.

  The time on the screen – which Mookie hadn’t even noticed – zooms backward.

  “Here,” Haversham says. The feed stops. Then starts playing.

  8:30pm.

  Ten seconds, fifteen. Nothing.

  Then the door opens.

  Then closes.

  Haversham stops it.

  “There,” he says. Like, voila, I just did a magic trick, except nobody sees that anything changed. No dove out of the hat, no card from the sleeve.

  The Boss looks at them, taps his head: “You need to powder up for this.”

  The denizens of the Underworld don’t show up on video, film, even audio – at least, not to those without Blue wrenching open the third-eye. Every once in a while some philosopher gets it in his head to talk about whether or not the powers of the Underworld are mystical or natural – something evolved out of nature or born from occult powers, but Mookie doesn’t know and doesn’t care. All he knows is, you want to see the monsters, you need to play with the peacock. And that’s what the Boss is telling him.

  Except, no peacock smear around the Boss’ temples – nor Haversham’s. So how’s he know?

  Doesn’t matter. The Boss knows. That’s good enough for Mookie.

  Werth pulls a palm-sized tin. It’s an old hair pomade container: “Doan Brothers’ Hair Pomade Dressing Pat Pending”. Rust flakes rain as he screws it open.

  Mookie pulls out his own tin. Hands shaking. The Blue is the key to a door he no longer wants to open. Nora…

  Werth gives him a l
ook.

  “You don’t need to jump in on this,” Werth says.

  “I want to see.” He doesn’t. But he has to.

  “You’re just coming off a high. Your pupils are like pencil points.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  Werth lowers his voice. “You’re gonna run yourself ragged.”

  “I said I’m in,” Mookie growls. And that ends it.

  Big thumbs in the blue, back to the temples, smudge one, smudge two. The stuff rolls in rougher this time: like a horse kick to the psychic center. Werth dips a pinkie in, does the same – the true denizens of the Great Below don’t need Cerulean to see their own kind, but a half-and-half like Werth needs to. His eyelids flutter like fly-wings against window blinds and then he’s blazing, too.

  Haversham replays the video.

  Fifteen seconds in: a shape.

  It emerges from the side, as if crossing the road.

  The closet suddenly feels to Mookie like an elevator. The floor dropping out. His heart and all his substantial viscera left in the air as everything else falls.

  Werth sees it, too. Sees her. “That little fucking bitch.”

  Nora.

  Something big is coming, Mookie.

  I’m going to change the game.

  Jesus.

  On the video feed, Nora walks right up to the front door. Pulls out a key. Unlocks. Opens. And then she’s gone.

  Mookie swallows a hard knot that feels like a baseball in his throat. He shoves Haversham out of the way, grabs the dial, fast-forwards in fifteen-minute increments. The door never opens again. Nora never comes back out.

  “Persephone,” the Boss says. He doesn’t know her as Nora. Nobody here but Werth knows that she’s Mookie’s daughter. If they were to ever find out…

  But Werth, he does know, and he stares icicles right through Mookie.

  “I thought the girl was pushed out,” Werth says, his voice barely containing the fact he’s talking more to Mookie than to Haversham or Zoladski. “I thought she was done in this city. And yet, here she is.”

  “This must be her last play,” the Boss says. “Last-ditch effort. And it’s a fucking doozy. I’m dying. And my only heir is…” His voice cracks. He looks away. “I need some air.” Haversham tries to hand him the oxygen mask but the Boss waves it away, says, “Leave the tank. I need some real air. You two. Come on. Let’s go outside.”

  Outside, the Boss lights a cigarette. Takes a deep inhale. Coughs like he swallowed fiberglass insulation. But then the coughs abate.

  “Haven’t smoked in fifteen fucking years,” the Boss says. “And tonight I had a nic-fit like you wouldn’t believe.” He looks up, scowls at Mookie and Werth. “What? Not like it’s going to give me more cancer, Christ.”

  People pass by. A few stares reserved for this motley crew – giant dude, cancer man, crippled old goat. The Boss spits a nit of nicotine out of his mouth.

  “You two are gonna handle this,” he says.

  “We need everybody on this–” Werth starts to say, but Mookie interrupts:

  “We can handle it.”

  “This is about our Southern business,” the Boss says. That’s what he calls their dealings with the Deep Downstairs. Southern business. “She’s been coming at us from that end all year. And the shit that she did to Casimir’s body…” He coughs into a handkerchief which comes away flecked with red. “That’s ritual. You wanna just kill a guy, you shoot him in the head. This means something. Find her. Figure it out.”

  “You got it,” Werth says.

  “Done,” Mookie says, his blood gone to slush.

  9

  The Five Occulted Pigments: Cerulean, as discussed. Then: Vermilion, or the Red Rage; Viridian, the Green Grave; Ochre, the Golden Gate; and Caput Mortuum, the Violet Void – or simply, “The Dead Head”. Most claim that these are a myth, but I do not believe it so. I have heard the gobbos in their gutter-tongue – yes, I’ve learned some of their words and sounds and crass gesticulations – speak of the other Pigments in reverent tones. We will not find the other four here in the Shallows, I suspect. But rather, they must exist in the Fathomless Tangle – or below that, in the Ravenous Expanse.

  – from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

  Outside the front door, Mookie starts to speak. But Werth pulls him away from the door and strides away. It’s a half-a-block up before Werth finally stops, steps into an alcove between two brownstones, and wheels on Mookie.

  The old goat is seething. Caprine nostrils flaring.

  “Werth–”

  “Don’t you fuckin’ start, Mook. Don’t.”

  “I didn’t know–”

  “That was her, wasn’t it? At your place the other night. When I called, she was there.” Mookie gnaws a thumbnail, but Werth grabs the hand and yanks it out of Mookie’s mouth. “Look at me and don’t lie. Why’d she come see you?”

  “She knew the Boss was sick.”

  “What?”

  “I dunno how. And then she said…” Don’t tell him, he doesn’t need to know. But Mookie hears the words coming out of his mouth: “Something was coming. Something… big. A game-changer.” He neglects to say she was the one who promised to change the game. He reserves that much loyalty for her.

  Werth snarls. “Mookie. This whole thing, this whole fucking thing, is on you. I told you to deal with her. I gave you a good length of leash on this one, didn’t I? I didn’t tell Haversham or the Boss how you were connected to her. I didn’t go after her myself even after the little cunt–”

  Mookie’s hand closes around Werth’s throat.

  “–shot me–” Werth gurgles.

  Mookie starts to squeeze.

  The blood rushes to Werth’s head, stays there like he’s tying off a water balloon. Mookie feels something jabbing him in the ribs–

  A .38 snubnose. Nickel-plated.

  Mookie doesn’t care. Keeps squeezing.

  Hammer back on the gun. Click.

  “Say you’re sorry,” Mookie growls.

  “Ggggfffuck you.” Then: “KkkaaaaI’ll shhhhooooot.”

  “Apologize.”

  The gun barrel digs harder between Mookie’s ribs. People are passing by, now – a Botoxed cougar with her boy-toy and her Yorkie, an old man with a newspaper under his arm. They see what’s going on and hurry past.

  The gun presses harder. The sights biting into his side.

  Finally, Werth says, “Zzzhhhhsssoooorry.”

  Mookie lets go. The old goat takes in a big gulp of breath, quickly pockets the gun.

  “You…” Gasp, wheeze, cough. “You fuckin’ asshole. Jesus, Mook.”

  “You’re talking about my daughter.”

  “Your daughter shot me. And now she’s gone and killed the Boss’s grandson.”

  “No.” Mookie shakes his head like a man in denial. “She… she didn’t. That kid was mashed into the floor like a stepped-on banana. She’s just a little girl.”

  “Maybe she had help.”

  “From who?”

  “Maybe from you.”

  Mookie feels like he’s been shot in the heart. “You… you know I’d never–”

  With a roll of his eyes Werth says, “Yeah, yeah, you’re loyal, I know. You’re like a dumb dog. I know you didn’t do this. But it sure matches your… style of doing business.”

  “He seemed like an all right kid.”

  “Well, now he’s dead thanks to your kid. Don’t gimme that look. Let’s say she didn’t do it. Doesn’t matter. We’re on the hook for this. Because if we don’t find her? They’re gonna send someone else. Maybe they already have. Like those two thugs, Spall and Lutkevich.”

  Those assholes. Two of the Organization’s killers. But they’re not precision men. They’re messy. Spray-and-pray types. They don’t do sniper rifles – they do a hand grenade chucked into an open room, even if that open room is a church or a pre-school.

  “I’ll find her,” Mookie says.

  “We�
�ll find her. Split up.”

  “Don’t kill her.”

  “That’s what’s gotta be done, Mook. It’s time.”

  “Just… bring her in. To me. Let me deal with her.” A voice asks: can you do it? Can you kill your own daughter? He knows he can’t. He’s had the chance. But something has to be done. Another voice: She didn’t do this. Bad as she is, she didn’t do this… “You owe me that much. I’ve done the work. I’m good.”

  “Owe you. Yeah. Fine. I’ll call you if I find her. And if you find her? I wanna know about it. You hear me?” Mookie nods. “Don’t fuck this up, Pearl. Even those big motherfucking shoulders of yours may not be able to hold the weight of all this.”

  Mookie heads toward the subway, hands shaking. Trying to picture Nora doing what she did – envisioning her smashing Casimir Zoladski’s head into the floor, cutting open his shirt, slicing into his back. Then the rite with the marigolds, the chocolate, the liquor.

  Doesn’t add up. Can’t be her. She’s not that strong. She’s a little thing. A fraction of his size – if he’s the whiskey bottle, she’s the shot glass. The strength it would take to pulp the kid’s face against that marble, it’d have to be – well, either him or a Trogbody, because those rock-bodied sonofabitches are strong. Even someone burning the Blue Blazes candle at both ends would have a hard time making that kind of a mess. So Mookie decides. No. His daughter is not a murderer.

  But Werth’s right. Everyone else is going to think it’s her.

  And if they find out she’s his daughter, they’re going to think he helped.

  As he walks, Mookie’s thinking about where to go, how to find Nora. Persephone. He hates that name. Daddy-o. That’s what she called him, wasn’t it? Back there at the bar. That means she really has been hanging out with the Get-Em-Girls.

  So that’s the first place he needs to look.

  Which means–

  It’s then that Mookie sees something as he heads back past the Boss’ place.

  A Lexus. The color of liquid pearl. It sits, parked across the street.

  It’s dark out but there’s a streetlight above–

  And in that car, Mookie sees a familiar face. The man from this morning. Candlefly, that’s what Haversham called him. The one traveling with the Snakeface.